THE JACKAL

Pavel was born in the slums of Velnias, where survival was its own currency. His mother was a sex worker, and while their life was harsh, it was better than most. Food was poor, but available and nutritious enough. They shared a cramped apartment with the others, working girls and their bastard children, all clinging to the scraps of a city that despised them. It grated him that those who partook in his mothers services, who paid for her time and body, respected her so little.

He learned the trade of survival early. It all came down to selling parts of yourself. At ten, he was already running drugs for the Deverauxs, slipping through the streets unnoticed because no one suspected a child of being a criminal, at least no outside of the slums. He mostly ran drugs in Velnias proper, to college students or wealthier patrons, and he grew envious of the life they had.

His first broken bone came at the age of eleven when a small-time gang caught wind of his routes and stole his shipment. They left him in an alley with a shattered arm. Hours later, Daniel Deveraux broke his pinky for losing product.

His first concussion came in a boxing gym, where he had gone to learn self-defense. He had traded another broken finger for a membership. An older boy enjoyed tormenting the new blood and laid into him during what was supposed to be a friendly spar. He lost consciousness before he could land a punch.

At fifteen, his mother disappeared. No warning. No note. No debt. Just gone. Pavel searched, he asked around and called in the small amount of favors he had, but deep down he knew the truth. In Velnias people didn’t leave. They were taken, sold, or buried.

By twenty he had broken more bones than he could count. Only now, they weren’t his. He had become an enforcer for the Volkov family, collecting debts from people who never had a chance of paying them. If they couldn’t, he took collateral. Sometimes it was their valuables, their house or their car, sometimes their bodies, even their lives on occasion.

The first few nights after selling someone into servitude, he lay awake, staring at the cracked ceiling of a shitty studio apartment. He thought of his mother, of how disappointed she would be.

Because the truth that kept him up was that everyone sold something to stay alive, and he was selling all of what made him the boy who would curl up into his mothers lap and laugh as she read him stories.

Then the next job came, and the next, and eventually it was just another transaction.

Everyone in Velnias sold something, the better off sold their time, their labor, and parts of their futures. The people of the slums just had to sell more. Their dignity. Their bodies. Their souls.

So when the a Volkovs higher up in a suit offered him essence, and told him to be quiet about it, he didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t worried about legality. He had committed enough sins to be thrown off the side of the Peninsula thrice over. But everyone knew the real price of essence wasn’t gold or favors.

It was you.

He had heard a story once. A Warden, a powerful once, who retired after having a child. Essence made her into something different, something alien, though no one saw it at the time. When she was a Warden, she had an outlet for the raw, unfiltered wrongess inside her. But once she left that behind, it festered. It grew and twisted further and further. She stopped seeing people as people. They were just amorphous shapes, faceless and shifting, lurking in the dark out to get her.

One night, she woke up from a nightmare, her mind still tangled in whatever horrors she had experienced. She saw a monster in her bed. And she killed it. When her senses cleared she found her husband’s body beside her. Their child broken on the floor.

Even after hearing all that, Pavel never wavered. He had long since resolved to sell all of himself if it meant clawing his way out.

So he partook in communion.

For three days, he sat alone in a dark room, the essence cupped so gently in his hands, as if he breathed wrong it would disappear. It’s energy rang through his fingertips like a second heartbeat. He imagined it sinking into his veins, his chest, pooling around his ribs and into his heart. With each breath he forged what allowed him to become a Harbinger, a core, a place of power.

When he emerged he was hungry, and parched, barely alive and delirious, his mind stretched so thin he thought it would snap, but he had won. He was a Harbinger. Touched by the power of the Great Old Ones.

And so he used it. He shattered bones, he healed his injuries, he fought in the pits and won. Again and again, he won. He climbed, clawing up the pit one brutal victory at a time, until the slums he felt as if the slums no longer held him.

But as the years passed, he realized the horrid truth. The wins piled up, but nothing else did. He had no dreams beyond the next fight. No future beyond the next opponent and the next win. He had given up everything to become what he already was. Nothing.

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Just another Volkov enforcer, another hired fist.

So he leaned into it. He had nothing else to be, so he became the role completely. He was a champion. A fighter. The man who always won. Undefeated.

Until he didn’t.

If he wasn’t the winner then what was left.

And in that moment of emptiness, the essence answered for him.

It broke from the core that he had forged, it shot through his body, twisting his mind as it went and made him into something else. Bones snapped, skin rippled, and he grew. He changed, as the space around him warped and quivered, the very world breaking under the new reality.

He was no longer the champion. He was no longer Pavel. No longer a man at all.

He had become an essence beast.

—

Bellamy felt the change before he saw it. It tore at his scaffolding, threatening to rip it piece by piece into the wind. He barely managed to coat himself in essence, just in time to avoid being turned into a fine red mist. The air around him remained still, no impact or strike, but his essence screamed at him. Shouting that he had come within a hair’s breadth of annihilation.. He turned – his gut already twisting with certainty– to face that which all Harbingers feared, unraveling. Becoming an essence beast.

Before him stood a massive, broken dog. Its jaw was shattered into four flailing flaps, more a blooming wound than mouth or maw.

It had more skin than fur, with patches of human hair sprouting in uneven tufts across its body. Its spine stretched far too long for its sagging skin to contain, curving and twisting just underneath as if trying to claw its way free from the beast's back. It hunched low, slobber dribbling from its mouth as it let out a hiccuping human cackle.

Pandemonium erupted from the audience as people surged towards the exit only to be met with barred doors. The first to arrive pounded them with heavy fists, voices raw as they screamed at the guards to open up. The second wave crashed into the first. Then the third. Then the fourth and fifth. They pressed together, a writhing mass of bodies until the first wave crushed against the thick wooden slabs, their screams drowned beneath the wet snap of breaking bones.

A gun shot rang out, muffled, whipping the crowd into a greater frenzy. He spared a look up to where Viracio was sitting. He held a gun in his hand, Penny’s brains were splattered against the glass. A few more shots rang out as the rat turned to the other guards, but Bellamy had no time to focus on him any longer. He threw himself to the side as the dog lunged. It catapulted across the arena, covering the distance as fast as a full speed freight train. The foundation of the building shook, dislodging portions of stone and dirt, both raining down throughout the basement. Dust billowed up, swallowing the beast in a swirl of fog. Bellamy went low, muscles coiling, waiting for the first flicker of movement. He had to see it. He had to–

MOVE.

His essence screamed at him as another ripple of power slammed against his defenses. He began a roll to the side, but stopped, eyes locked onto the smoke as his eyes widened. He scrambled to stop his momentum barely succeeding as the creature pounced at the place he would’ve been.

It baited him. It baited him like a pit fighter would. Bellamy’s breath caught – then spilled into a string of curses. The thing was intelligent.

The essence beast wasn’t even fully transformed. If it had been it would have no mind for tactics, for complex thought processes, it would simply rampage, essence leaking out of it as it constantly used its ability before eventually imploding.

The thought sent a chill up his spine as the beast let out another chocking laugh. It began to circle. Bellamy responded in kind.

He sent out his own pulse of essence, gauging its ambience in the air. The essence. It wasn’t leaking. The creature was stable. It wouldn’t just disappear. It would stay like a Titan would. Hell. Did this count as being a Titan? He didn’t know. He understood the theory, it was drilled into him in that cold iron room, but this wasn’t covered. This was new. It had to be.

He had to think. He couldn’t let his mind wander. Pavel had the ability to move impacts. The dogs should be similar. It didn’t have the musculature it should have to be able to move that fast, so it was somehow using its ability to do so.

The beast was done circling. It snipped forward, its top and bottom mouth flaps opening wide to take his arm. Bellamy ducked left. The beast’s head snapped after him, maw splitting. The left flap snapped in a tearing motion. It used them independently, like one would use fingers except for these had sharp rotted teeth. It bit with the top and bottom, and sawed with the left and right.

Bellamy clenched his fist, and sent an uppercut to the dog's throat from his lower position. It impacted with a crunch and sent Bellamy rolling to the right. Disorientation. Shock. He glanced left. Nothing. But something had still struck.

The beast had done it. Turned his own strike against him.

He turned the impact into a roll, and angled it forward, hoping to get underneath the creature while he recovered.He scrambled to his feet, but the beast was already matching him, its gnashing, alternating jaws testing his defenses.

It couldn’t have seen the impact. Could it have? Pavel had to focus to use the ability, was the creature better at it. Did it feel the hit coming?

He shot forward, sliding under a nip. Flat on his back he planted his hands over his head and brought his feet over his hips. He pushed, stopping the upward kick an inch away from the creature's belly, letting the air pressure and current hit the beast, before extending his foot for a kick. It impacted him in the ribs.

The creature howled in glee. Its ability was always active now, a constant part of itself.

Twisting its body, it raised a hind leg and slammed it into Bellamy’s chest. The floor shattered, spider webbing cracks across the arena. The essence coating his body took the majority of the impact, and even still he could feel several of his ribs break. He grit his teeth, sending more and more essence through his body as the bones knit themselves back together. But the monster just kept increasing the pressure, kept putting more and more weight on that one leg as it twisted its head down to look at him in glee.

A whistle split the air, sharp and unnatural, like a blade dragged across glass. The dog’s body spasmed and for the first time it let out a low growl. The sound caught, and broke against its throat – deep and guttural – like an engine choking on its own fuel.

It yipped and bit at thin air before snarling and hurtling itself forward. Away from Bellamy and towards the mob of people still at the door. Bellamy felt the essence growing around it. Felt the rolling of essence and power as when he escaped turning into red mist.

It reached the edge of the arena, and everyone near the door was pulled apart in an instant. Screaming one second, and silence the next. Quiet settled over the arena. The few survivors at the edges, those who hadn’t rushed to the doors or otherwise hid, held their breath, not daring to make a sound. For another second the only noise was the buzz of light bulbs, and Bellamy finally understood the ability. The ability at its core. Not Pavel’s understanding of the ability, and not how he used it, but it’s actual ability.

Not impact redirection.

Force manipulation.

And if it could focus enough, it could expand its thoughts and think in complex ways combined with an instinctual understanding of the world.

Then it could manipulate the forces of atoms that held people together. The only reason he wasn’t paste was because he coated himself in essence. Large impacts would only be dulled when he did so, but an infinite amount of tiny forces would become non-existent. But for those who had no essence, who couldn’t cover and protect themselves for it.

The thing, it wasn’t a beast anymore. The jackal at the door was walking death.